Is America undergoing a fundamental shift in how people commute and run errands? Recent articles in The Denver Post and national media might leave that impression.

And if true, of course, it undermines arguments in favor of adding lane capacity to strained commuting corridors.

But hold on a minute.

To be sure, car-sharing services like Car2Go and Zipcar, which rent vehicles for short urban rides, are booming. And inexpensive options to taxis such as uberX and Lyft are thriving.

Meanwhile, urban core cities like Denver are growing denser, and many boast a growing number of bike lanes painted over what used to be lanes for cars.

For that matter, average “vehicle miles traveled” per driver peaked some years ago.

Finally, a s The New York Times recently reported, “More Americans used buses, trains and subways in 2013 than in any year since 1956.” In metro Denver, the Regional Transportation District touts its 101 million passenger trips last year as the most in its history.

Before the New Urbanist in you gets too excited, however, a little perspective is in order.

To begin with, transit still accounts for a remarkably small percentage of total trips, namely 2 to 3 percent. And as a trio of professors — David King, Michael Manville and Michael Smart — pointed out in a recent Washington Post op-ed, although total transit trips are up nationwide since 2008, annual trips per person actually fell from 35 to 34.

“Transit is a small and stagnant part of the transportation system,” they concluded.

Indeed, transit’s share of work trips remains way below what it was in 1970, and below 1980’s level, too.

If there’s a trend in the commuting data, it’s that more of us than ever “prefer to go it alone,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports recent Census data showing that “Americans increasingly ride solo or work from home.”

“Car pooling has tanked,” it notes, while “a category the Census calls ‘other means’ — which includes biking — stands at 2 percent, largely unchanged over the past decade.”

Meanwhile, The Journal adds, “the only area that has seen clear growth is working from home — which has doubled to 4 percent, up from 2 percent in 1980.”

“In actual numbers,” Cox reports, “working at home added 1.9 times the increase in transit commuting [since 2007]. Its change in market share was greater than that of transit in 42 of the 52 major metropolitan areas.”

The increase in home offices might explain in part the flatline on vehicle miles traveled — as well as an aging population, sluggish job creation and a surge of online shopping substituting for trips to the mall. But those factors hardly suggest we should prepare an RIP sign for the age of automobiles.

Even if the long march in vehicle miles traveled is truly and finally over, Colorado and other states with expanding populations can’t afford to relax regarding investment in roads. There will be more registered vehicles in Colorado a decade from now, and more drivers, too. And yet U.S. 36 between Boulder and Denver, I-25 between 120th Avenue and Fort Collins and I-70 into the mountains and through north Denver — just to mention a few stressed corridors — already suffer from too much time-consuming congestion.

And yet critics of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s plans to boost capacity in such routes have begun to cite changing driving patterns in their indictment.

It’s a phony argument — and if it prevails, bad congestion will only get worse.